# Ethereum’s Glamsterdam Upgrade Could Triple Layer-1 Capacity – And Push Fees Near Zero
Ethereum is preparing for its most consequential protocol upgrade in years. The Glamsterdam hard fork, scheduled for June 2026, will raise the network’s gas limit from 60 million to about 200 million per block – a 3.3x increase that developers and researchers say could push Ethereum’s base layer toward 10,000 transactions per second while driving fees so low they approach zero in normal conditions.
For a network that has spent years routing transaction volume through Layer 2 rollups to escape high fees, Glamsterdam represents a fundamental shift in philosophy: instead of simply offloading throughput to secondary layers, Ethereum is now expanding what the base chain itself can handle.
What Glamsterdam Changes
The upgrade combines two major components: the Amsterdam execution layer upgrade and the Gloas consensus layer upgrade – the portmanteau name, following Ethereum’s tradition of naming hard forks after cities and stars.
The key technical innovations driving the throughput improvement are:
Block-Level Access Lists (BALs) BALs allow the Ethereum Virtual Machine to predict which storage slots and accounts a transaction will touch before executing it. This pre-declaration enables validators to process multiple transactions in parallel instead of sequentially – a fundamental shift in how the EVM handles computation.
Under the current sequential model, each transaction must complete before the next begins, creating a natural bottleneck regardless of how high the gas limit climbs. BALs break that bottleneck, allowing the network to more fully use available block space.
Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation (ePBS) ePBS separates the roles of block proposers (validators who create blocks) and block builders (entities who assemble transaction sets) at the protocol level. Previously this separation existed only through MEV-Boost, an external software layer. Enshrining it in the protocol removes dependence on centralised relays, improves validator decentralisation, and creates a more stable foundation for high-throughput block production.
Gas Limit Expansion Taken together, BALs and ePBS allow Ethereum to safely raise the gas limit from 60 million to a target of around 200 million. The safety question has historically been the limiting factor: a higher gas limit without parallel execution would slow state sync and create attack surface for spam transactions. Glamsterdam resolves this by making throughput-per-unit-gas more efficient, not just increasing raw gas throughput.
According to Hasu, an advisor at Lido Finance who has been tracking the upgrade closely, the gas limit increase alone represents “the largest single expansion of Ethereum’s execution capacity since the Merge.”
What 10,000 TPS Means in Practice
At 200 million gas per block with a 12-second block time, and using average transaction costs as a baseline, researchers project effective throughput in the range of 8,000-10,000 TPS for standard transfers. Complex DeFi interactions will use more gas per transaction, but even accounting for that, the practical capacity improvement is dramatic.
By comparison:
- Ethereum today: about 1,000 TPS effective throughput on L1
- Post-Glamsterdam target: about 10,000 TPS
- Visa’s peak capacity: about 24,000 TPS
Ethereum won’t surpass Visa’s peak throughput at launch, but it’ll close the gap significantly – and do so on a decentralised, permissionless network settling real economic value.
The fee implications are equally significant. During periods of low-to-moderate network demand, the expanded capacity means base fees will fall toward zero, with users paying only priority tips to validators. High-demand events – NFT drops, major DeFi liquidations, token launches – will still cause fee spikes, but the baseline cost of transacting on Ethereum will drop for most users most of the time.
Impact on Layer 2 Economics
One question the upgrade raises: what happens to Ethereum’s Layer 2 system if L1 becomes dramatically cheaper and faster?
The answer, according to Ethereum researchers, is detailed. Layer 2 rollups derive their cost advantage from batching many transactions into single L1 proofs, and from the security and finality guarantees they inherit from Ethereum’s base layer. Even at 200 million gas per block, L2s will still offer meaningfully cheaper execution for applications running complex computation or handling very high transaction volumes.
What changes is the competitive dynamics. Applications that previously needed L2 for any usable cost profile may now find L1 viable again, particularly for higher-value transactions where the trust-minimisation of settling directly on the base chain is worth a modest premium. L2 solutions, meanwhile, will continue to serve applications requiring thousands of micro-transactions per second – gaming, social, micro-payments – where even 10,000 L1 TPS is insufficient.
Timeline and Market Reaction
Glamsterdam is targeting a June 2026 deployment date, following a final testnet phase. Developer coordination calls as recently as May 2026 confirmed the feature set is locked and no additional EIPs will be bundled into this hard fork.
Ethereum’s price has been trading around $2,100-$2,200 in recent weeks, underperforming Bitcoin which remains near $77,000-$78,000. Analysts at JPMorgan have noted that institutional capital is returning to Bitcoin faster than to ETH, citing DeFi stagnation and security concerns as headwinds.
Glamsterdam is viewed by Ethereum proponents as a potential spark to reignite the investment case for ETH. A tripling of L1 capacity, combined with falling fees, could drive a new wave of dApp development directly on the base chain – increasing demand for ETH as gas, which feeds into the deflationary mechanics introduced by EIP-1559’s fee-burning model.
Jane Street notably shifted $82 million from Bitcoin ETF exposure to Ethereum ETF positions in Q1 2026, a move analysts interpreted as an early bet on the Glamsterdam narrative.
Developer and Community Reaction
Ethereum’s core developer community has been positive about the upgrade timeline. The combination of BALs and ePBS represents years of research work reaching production readiness simultaneously – a coordination achievement that has historically proven difficult for Ethereum’s decentralised development process.
“Glamsterdam is what Ethereum needed to remind people that L1 can still be the execution layer, not just a settlement layer,” said one contributor active on the Ethereum magicians forum. “The rollup-centric plan was a detour, but this is the destination.”
Not everyone is optimistic. Some L2 developers have noted that a dramatically cheaper L1 could strain business models built on the assumption of persistently high Ethereum fees. Others have raised questions about whether validator clients are fully prepared to handle 200 million gas blocks without performance degradation on lower-end hardware.
The Ethereum Foundation has indicated it’s working closely with client teams to ensure the upgrade is stable across all major implementations before the June deployment date.
FAQ
what’s the Ethereum Glamsterdam upgrade? Glamsterdam is Ethereum’s next major hard fork, combining the Amsterdam execution layer and Gloas consensus layer upgrades. Its primary effect is raising the network’s gas limit from 60 million to about 200 million per block through parallel execution enabled by Block-Level Access Lists and Enshrined Proposer-Builder Separation. The upgrade targets June 2026 and aims to push L1 throughput toward 10,000 transactions per second.
Will Glamsterdam make Ethereum fees cheaper? Yes, significantly in most conditions. By tripling the available block space, Glamsterdam will lower base fees during periods of normal demand, approaching near-zero costs for standard transactions. High-demand events will still cause fee spikes, but the baseline cost of transacting on Ethereum is expected to fall materially after the upgrade.
What happens to Ethereum Layer 2 networks after Glamsterdam? Layer 2 rollups will continue to serve applications requiring very high transaction volumes or complex computation. The upgrade narrows the cost gap between L1 and L2, making L1 viable again for a broader range of applications, but L2s retain advantages in throughput, specialisation, and economics for high-frequency use cases.
